User blog comment:Flia/Canon material/@comment-1512913-20111211013944/@comment-775152-20111213035615

Sorry, busy weekend. Personally, don't see a link between Arkham and Mad Hatter. I'm sure an arguement can be made for it, but, as with any literary arguement, that doesn't make it true. Capcom did say that anything not contradicted by the games is canon. However, I don't see anything blatantly contradictory about the manga. The missing third volume and the lack of a defined place in the DMC timeline really do hinder our efforts to determine if the manga is canon or now. There are, however, enough questions left unanswered by the manga that I can see the arguement for it to be non-canon. (Though, as is obvious, I don't believe that arguement.)

But we don't have to take a vote for one over the other. Things don't have to be canon or non-canon, black or white, confirmed or busted. We do, thankfully, have a handy third option: Disputed. I've been thinking about templates for canon/non-canon designations for a while now, and I thought there might be times where we couldn't prove one way or the other. We can designate story arcs as canon, like the games; non-canon, like the comic; or disputed, like the DMC3 and DMC4 mangas. I'll whip something up on my Sandbox to further illustrate my point.